Slow molasses drip under a tipped-up crescent moon.

Books

Note: Here’s my latest “Leading Thoughts” article from the new edition of TREE Press, the monthly newsletter of TREE Fund, of which I am President and CEO.

Before coming to TREE Fund, I served as Executive Director of the Salisbury House Foundation, which owns and operates an amazing historic house museum in Des Moines, Iowa. Salisbury House was built in the 1920s within a glorious 12-acre oak forest, and its owners – cosmetics magnate Carl Weeks and his wife Edith – worked diligently to protect the grand old trees around their 42-room manor home, most of which still provide shade to the house and gardens.

Carl Weeks was an extraordinary collector of rare books and documents, and one of the great delights in my work at Salisbury House was being able to study, work with, and teach from his 3,500-book library. One of items in the collection was an early edition of John Evelyn’s Sylva, or A Discourse of Forest-Trees and the Propagation of Timber in His Majesty’s Dominions (c. 1664-1670), arguably the first great treatise in the English language on the science, care and importance of trees. It was a massive success then, and has remained in print for over 350 years.

While Evelyn appreciated the beauty of trees, his underlying call to action was an economic one: trees provided fuel, building supplies, food, defense, and a litany of other crucial day-to-day needs in pre-industrial England, and the island’s forests were being denuded in the aftermath of the English Civil War. “We had better be without gold than without timber,” Evelyn wrote, encouraging land owners to plant trees as a matter of patriotic obligation. His countrymen heard him, and many old English forests today are home to trees planted by Sylva’s earliest devotees.

On April 27, 2018, millions of people across our own country will honor National Arbor Day by planting trees, providing innumerable benefits, some that John Evelyn understood in the 1660s — but many others of which are known to us now only through the types of modern scientific research empowered by TREE Fund. You can further this ongoing scientific legacy by making a gift to TREE Fund’s Arbor Day Appeal. We’re proud to work on behalf of our trees and the people who care for them, and take pride in being a link in a chain of inquiry that spans centuries – and will benefit those who follow us for centuries to come.

Click on “Sylva” to make your own contribution on behalf of our urban and community forests, and the professionals who study and care for them.

We are closing in on the shortest day of the year, and that always puts me in a reflective mood, so how’s about a trawl through 2017 to summarize the year that was, for those interested in such matters. (And if that doesn’t include any of you, well, then at least I’ve given myself a nice summary for future reference. Excelsior!)

ON THE WEB:

I posted 35 thingies (some fiendish) on the blog this year. The number actually surprised me; I would have guessed less. Last year I posted 27 times, though I was working on the short story project, so at least I was producing more long-form stuff than I did this year. In 2015, I posted 77 times. I guess either this blog’s swirling along a slow spiral to oblivion (like most blogs), or this is just the new normal. We’ll see what 2018 brings us. The ten most read new posts here in 2017 were:

The ten old posts that got the most traffic in 2017 were as follows. It’s always fascinating to me which of the 1,000-ish posts that I keep on the blog interest people (or search engines, anyway) the most all these years on . . .

I gave up on Facebook years ago, but I remain active on Twitter. I have learned after a very long time online that accepting or seeking connections just for the sake of doing so is a tool for madness, so I generally ascribe to Dunbar’s Numberand try to keep my follows and followers around the 150 level. I am a little high on both fronts right now, so there might be some purging to be done by year’s end. On a political front (while I try not to write about that much here), Tiny Blue Isle is my go-to aggregator for Chicago-oriented progressive stuff. Bonus points for them using my poem as inspiration for their handle. I should also note that a photograph I took during the Chicago Marathon went wildly viral, for all of the wrong/right reasons (depending on whose views you take).

Where I used to regularly read one or more newspapers each morning to get my day started, my train commuting routine now involves three websites, which are almost always refreshed on a daily basis, and which fill the time in a very satisfying fashion as I rumble down the rails from Chicago to Naperville. In the order that I read them each day:

The Fall Online Forum: I’ve been a reader here for about 15 years, and an active poster for over a decade. You don’t have to be a fan of legendary English band The Fall to have fun in this forum: it’s high volume, with threads on pretty much everything under the sun, and some things from elsewhere, if you’re willing and able to trawl around a bit. It’s an old school message board, so there’s a nice nostalgia factor in play there, too. (Edit: Literally days after I posted this, the hosting site unilaterally updated the FOF, so now it looks like a typical modern web forum. Phooey!) Recommended, if you need a place to romp and stomp and waste time on the man’s dime. Smart people, passionate and knowledgeable about all sorts of arcana and oddities, and a great place (for me) to get an outside-the-US perspective on what the hell’s going on in the world these days. Plus the time difference between the UK and Chicago means that in the early morning here, I’ve got hours of new posts there to peruse.

Thoughts On The Dead: My favorite purveyor of semi-fictionality (have you heard of the concept?) has produced two novels’ worth of utterly stupendous world-building in his ongoing Little Aleppo Chronicles, along with a surrealistic treasure trove of character-based stories, timely satire, and the best writing about everybody’s favorite semi-defunct choogly band to be found in this universe and time stream. And if you nab the time sheath, you might find that it’s the best such writing in any universe or time stream. Try not to commit any felonies if you do that, though, please and thanks. Oh, and Thoughts On The Dead is being considered for an Oscar this year too! Be sure to check out his Christmas List if you visit, and do the right thing, namsain? You don’t want Donate Button to come looking for you.

Electoral-Vote Dot Com: I’ve been depending upon (and writing about) this website for my election season news aggregation since 2004, long before some of their more-highly-visible imitators started pilfering their data-driven approach. Normally, after the final counts were tallied in late 2016/early 2017, they would have shut down for a couple of years — but things this year are just so freakin’ weird that they’ve decided to keep rolling with the daily posts, for which I am thankful. There’s lots of political news aggregators out there on the web, and I consider these guys to be the pinnacle of the form. Good data, good sources, no bullshit, solid interpretation. Highly recommended.

TRAVEL

Marcia and I began the year in Reykjavik, watching the citizens of Iceland lose their collective minds in an orgy of fireworks and bonfires. We are going to end 2017 in Key West, with Katelin in tow this time. We were there for New Year’s Eve 2009/2010 as well, and it was a hoot. Here’s hoping that the city is well recovered from its hurricane damage, and that we have a nice warm night for the drag queen drop to marshall us into 2018.

I had tried to travel less for work this year, but it didn’t really quite work out that way, as my annual travel map (including planned holiday travel) indicates:

There were loads of adventures and lots of good work done over the the course of the year, but the particular highlights (beyond Iceland) of 2017 travel included: a family trip to the Netherlands and Belgium (where Katelin got to meet her spirit animal); getting to experience the solar eclipse in the mountains of North Carolina with the extended Smith-Duft families (minus Katelin, alas); a trip to the National Museum of African American History and Culture, where I go to see (ZOMFG) The Mothership; and riding the Tour des Trees in and around my old stomping grounds of Washington, DC and Annapolis, where I got to dedicate a Liberty Tree on the grounds of the State Capitol.

Leaving a nicer legacy in Annapolis than I did 30+ years ago. (Me in yellow NAVY cap).

We have two good movie theaters within easy walking distance of our apartment, not to mention Amazon Prime and Netflix, so we watched a lot of movies this year. At the time of this writing, here are my Top Ten Films of the Year . . . though I note that I have some Oscar Bait movies to see between now and early January, so this list could change a little bit before the dust settles on the year.

Get Out

Trainspotting 2

mother!

The Big Sick

A Ghost Story

Dunkirk

The Disaster Artist

The Florida Project

Lady Bird

The Darkest Hour

Special mention to two epic television experiences that held us bound in front of the screen this year: Amir Bar-Lev’s outstanding Grateful Dead documentary, Long Strange Trip, and David Lynch/Mark Frost’s thrilling and maddening Twin Peaks: The Return. I’m not sure which story was weirder . . .

BOOKS:

Years ago, I summarized my general book reading habits thusly: 10% Fiction, 40% Natural Science and History, 40% Music Biography, and 10% Tales of Human Suffering. Nothing too far afield in the mix of this year’s Top Ten Books, even if the percentages change, so I remain adamantly predictable in my tastes. (Note that a few of these books came out toward the end of 2016, but I didn’t read them until this year, so I’m recognizing them now):

Autonomous by Annalee Newitz

Borne (and The Strange Bird) by Jeff VanderMeer

The Salt Line by Holly Goddard Jones

Apollo 8: The Thrilling Story of the First Mission to the Moon by Jeffrey Kluger

Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari

The Erstwhile by Brian Catling

The Show That Never Ends: The Rise And Fall of Prog Rock by David Weigel

Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness by Peter Godfrey-Smith (December 2016)

The Gradual by Christopher Priest (December 2016)

I should note that this list is based on traditional print media output, but if we expand the definition of “book” to include serialized fiction online, then we must also add A Book With No Title by Thoughts On The Dead (see above) to the list.

PERFORMANCES:

We also went to a ton of live performances this year, in a variety of genres and idioms. Rather than break them up into different bits, I list my 15 favorites below, chronologically:

Too Hot to Handel, Auditorium Theater, January 15

Carmen, Lyric Opera, March 3

Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Oriental Theater, March 11

Adrian Belew Power Trio, Old Town School, April 1

Destiny of Desire, Goodman Theater, April 8

Jean-Michel Jarre, Auditorium Theater, May 22

U2 and The Lumineers, Soldier Field, June 4

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Auditorium Theater, June 16

Paradise Blue, TimeLine Theater, July 15

Wire and Noveller, Metro, September 16

Rigoletto, Lyric Opera, October 14

Giselle, Joffrey Ballet/Auditorium Theater, October 29

Pere Ubu and Minibeast, Beat Kitchen, November 18

King Crimson, Riverside Theater (Milwaukee), November 26

In The Next Room, TimeLine Theater/Stage 773, December 9

ART:

As with so many other things, we’re blessed with a plethora of riches right here in our neighborhood: The Art Institute of Chicago and the Chicago Cultural Center are both within 10 minute walks of our apartment, so I visit each of them every few weeks, just because they’re my fave indoor places to go, solo or with friends. Here are the ten art happenings in Chicago that most moved me in 2017 (in no particular order), and those two venues feature most heavily, just because I’ve seen everything they offered in both permanent and temporary exhibitions over the past twelve months.

Takashi Murakami: The Octopus Eats Its Own Leg, Museum of Contemporary Art

Along The Lines: Selected Drawings by Saul Steinberg, Art Institute of Chicago

Chicago Architecture Biennial, Chicago Cultural Center

Tarsila do Amaral: Inventing Modern Art in Brazil, Art Institute of Chicago

Ben Shahn: If Not Now, When? Spertus Institute for Jewish Learning and Leadership

Provoke: Photography in Japan between Protest and Performance, 1960–1975, Art Institute of Chicago

Jack Kerouac’s On the Road Scroll, American Writer’s Museum

Eugene Eda’s Doors for Malcolm X College, Chicago Cultural Center

India Modern: The Painting of M.F. Husain, Art Institute of Chicago

And . . . I guess that’s it! Unless something moves me profoundly to write here in the next couple of weeks, it’ll probably be 2018 when I next check in at the blog. ‘ta ’til then from all of us in The Adventure Family . . .

Having written about the best films and albums of our nascent century, it seems apt to turn my attention to literature, which is ostensibly the third leg beneath my personal stool of modern culture, which would tip precariously without each of its two fellows.

My 21st CenturyFilm List contained 25 entries. My 21st Century Albums List contained 64 entries. And my 21st Century Books List? At the moment, it contains one entry that stands head and shoulders above all others in terms of my enjoyment and engagement . . . and that entry is A Book With No Title.

Allow me to explain my choice, please. Almost two years ago this month, I posted a blog item about how much I was enjoying Thoughts On The Dead. It was a funny website, for sure, written by a very good writer, cleverly exploring cultural themes I enjoyed exploring, with laughs to be had, for those willing to laugh about arcana of the most arcane variety. Good stuff! Ha ha ha!

But some time between then and now, a standalone story line emerged on ToTD about a Neighborhood in America called Little Aleppo. That story line was anchored upon a truly robust substrate of universe building . . . where the place in which the story was framed emerged almost as a character in its own right, as rich as the human/physical characters with which it was populated. Think Gormenghast. Think Middle Earth. ThinkUpstate Wasted/Ether. Place matters, right? Right!

This week, that very sublime and well-crafted Little Aleppo story wound to its narrative close after 70 chapters, and I am saddened and pleased in equal measure by this turn of events. Saddened, because I loved getting new stories every couple of days, usually reading them during my morning train rides between Chicago and Naperville. Pleased (on behalf of the author), because I know, as a writer, how satisfying it is to reach a point of closure on a long-term writing project like this one, be it for commercial purposes, or just because it feels good to write, by God, purpose be damned.

I have truly enjoyed reading The Book With No Title episodically, in real time, classic 19th Century Dickens-style. And you can read it that way, too, if you want, as all 70 chapters are independently referenced and linked for now on a single reference page. Once you start, or when you finish, or somewhere in between those points, I hope you will acknowledge the author’s awesome undertaking by hitting the “Donate” button on his site.

Because writing this good deserves to be paid for and purchased. It has both intellectual and emotional value, and we, all of us, should acknowledge and honor that fact by paying for it, when and where we can. I can certainly tell you, straight up, that Little Aleppo provided me with far more enjoyment than the vast majority of traditional/digital books I’ve purchased in recent years, so making a donation to support the work was good value for money from where I sit.

Lest you think I’m shilling for any nefarious personal/nepotistic benefit here, I want to note for the record that I have absolutely no clue who the author of Thoughts on the Dead is, in the real world, despite the fact that I interact with him regularly in the social media world, and relish his blog postings, daily. As a “longtime online” guy, I accept the fact that I often have digital friends and collaborative colleagues with whom I rarely/never cross paths in a real/physical world. See herefor an intense personal example of that.

Marcia affectionately refers to these online relationships as my “imaginary internet friends,” and I have to admit that I probably have more of those than I do real world friends at this point in my life. So, yeah, that’s real, but not real. And that’s imaginary, but not imaginary. See also: it’s complicated. But at bottom line, genius is genius, whether we know who creates it or not in our real day-to-day lives. I’m happy to interact with such creative folks in the ways that they choose to make themselves available to me. They fuel my own creative energy as they entertain me, and I am very grateful for that.

And that’s a big part of why I confidently assert that the The Book With No Title is the best work of narrative fiction I’ve read in a long, long time. I think all of my readers here, friends real and imaginary, need to get on it too, and read it, and share it, and pay for it, soon. Or now. If you take my advice, then once The Book With No Title becomes the popular print hit it deserves to be in the years ahead, you can get mad props with your peeps by telling them all that you read it way back when, before it was cool.

And who doesn’t appreciate being in the know before the know was known, right?

We’re two days shy of the year’s shortest day, and deep in the heart of the coldest snap of the current winter, so it seems a good time to look back over the past twelve months here at the blog and in the greater personal, professional and cultural world around me.

Counting this one, I published 27 blog posts here in 2016. That’s a big drop off from the 77 posts I published in 2015, but that was a somewhat conscious decision as I decided to focus on my Short Story of the Month project, which I completed successfully earlier this month. The 12 new stories I wrote over the past year were knit together with half a dozen older ones into a single manuscript, and it’s off for copy editing as I type. You writing types: if you’ve got any good leads you’d suggest for placing the manuscript commercially in 2017, I would appreciate an introduction!

Marcia and I opened 2016 in our still new home town of Chicago, watching the inaugural edition of the city’s “Chi-Town Rising” star drop on the river, which was frankly underwhelming. You’ve got too much going for you, Chicago, to try to ape New York City! Let them have their thing, because you’ve got plenty of your own! Seriously! They’re apparently doing it again this year, but we will welcome 2017 in a more exotic locale instead: Reykjavik, Iceland. We loved our summer trip there some years ago, and are excited to see it under the polar twilight with (hopefully) some Northern Lights in play to guide us into a new year together.

Between those two points, we had a crazy travel year. Marcia goes back and forth between Chicago and Des Moines ever other week for work, and I traveled to 26 states this year for my own work with the TREE Fund. (Speaking of, it’s not too late to contribute to our year-end appeal . . . hint hint). Since a picture is worth 1,000 words, here’s the visual representation of my travels in 2016:

The arrow pointing southward was to Grand Cayman, which Marcia and I visited together as part of a work trip for me. One of the northerly arrows points to Iceland, as mentioned above, and the other one points to Tuscany, where Marcia and I had a wonderful vacation with many new friends from Australia and New Zealand. I also did about 600 of those miles on a bicycle through my native Carolinas. Big thanks to R. Jeanette Martin for the photos at that prior link, which are totally worth seeing, even if I’m in them.

See? While it was my intention to try to do a little bit less traveling this year for work, I just laid out my 2017 schedule with my staff, and at this point it looks like I will be going to Mississippi, Arizona, Puerto Rico, Michigan, Wisconsin, Ontario, Maryland (twice), Virginia, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Florida, Colorado, Washington (state), Oregon, Missouri, Texas, Iowa, Connecticut, California, Ohio and Oklahoma during the next twelve months. Plus wherever Marcia and I decide to go for our international summer trip. Personally, I’m lobbying for Malta. So, uh, my 2017 map will probably look like a spaghetti chart too. Hmmm.

Even with all of that travel, I suspect that 2017 will look like more of a typical blogging year for me, so if you have been and intend to remain a faithful follower this site, then (1st) thank you, and (2nd) there might be more things for you to read beyond short stories next year. I’m considering a couple of web-based writing projects that are a little bit more interactive, so will update on that when I decide which one (if any) I want to pursue.

Some other bits and bobs to wrap things up . . .

Music, Theater and Dance: I’ve already done my 25th Annual Best Albums Report, here, and my Annual List Of Most Played Songs, here. On the live front, we saw many plays, concerts and dance performances, and honestly, I’m just really happy to have spent the year experiencing them in the moment and not documenting and making lists of them, and I’m disinclined to go back and do so now to try to recreate them after the fact. Maybe next year, I’ll start keeping a list. Or maybe not. We’ll see. I kinda think my live performance criticizing years may be behind me, y’know?

Books: As posted here multiple times before, my book reading tends to cluster predictably into four primary areas: 10% Fiction, 40% Natural Science and History, 40% Music Biography, and 10% Tales of Human Suffering. Over the past year, my fave reads didn’t stray too far from the norm, although I read more older books than newer books in 2016, so my list of favorite new releases is a bit brief:

The Fisherman by John Langan

Death’s End by Cixin Liu

The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben

The Genius of Birds by Jennifer Ackerman

Not Dead Yet: The Memoir by Phil Collins

My Damage: The Story of a Punk Rock Survivor by Keith Morris

But What If We’re Wrong? by Chuck Klosterman

Movies: We have a theater within walking distance of our apartment, so we saw more flicks in first release than we typically have in the past. The best films I saw in 2016 (thus far, recognizing that much of the Oscar Bait is just coming out now) would include:

The Witch (My current pick for Best Movie of 2016)

The Lobster (A very close second place)

Everybody Wants Some!!

The Jungle Book

Florence Foster Jenkins

Sausage Party

Hell Or High Water

Arrival

Manchester By The Sea

La La Land

Office Christmas Party

Politics: Ennnnnhhhhh . . . . the less said here the better, I think. I’ll leave it to others to write about those matters more regularly and effectively than I do. That said, I did write and publish a poem here in the days after the election called “Tiny Blue Isle,” which explains what it feels like to me to live in Chicago right now. A local colleague liked the concept and approached me about using it for a progressive politics feed on Twitter and (maybe later) as a website, and I agreed to let my friend do so. Follow here for more news on that in the months ahead.

Art: We are blessed with ready and easy proximity to some exceptionally fine museums hereabouts, and three solo exhibitions stand out for me among the dozens we saw in 2016:

Websites: Two websites dominated my daily reading in 2016, and I have written about both of them here before:

Electoral Vote Dot Com: I’ve been following this website through every Presidential election since 2004, and I think it remains the best real-time aggregator of relevant information, and the best site for thoughtful, objective analysis that I’ve found for comprehending our incomprehensible electoral nightmare process. I wrote about it back in 2012, and my thoughts about it (and its competition) remain unchanged.

Thoughts On The Dead: I wrote about this website back in 2015, and my thoughts on this one have changed a bit. At the time, I cited it as one of the few websites that actually made me “laugh out loud” (not LOL) as it did a bit of creative world building around the history of the Grateful Dead. While that element of it remains (e.g. the coverage of the Dead And Company tour with John Mayer was sublime and hilarious), somewhere along the way, the site also evolved to include some truly brilliant fiction (the Roy Head adventures, the Route 77 travelogue, and the Little Aleppo series, among others) and some of the most incredible rock music writing I’ve ever read, anywhere (the recent series on Van Halen and Queen, most especially). The volume of exceedingly high quality work being posted here on a nearly daily basis boggles my mind. Thoughts On The Dead is unquestionably my Website of the Year for 2016, and if I knew who he was in real life, I’d celebrate and hail him by name as my flat-out favorite writer of the past twelve months as well. And I’m done here with this note, so get on over there and just dig in . . . wonders await you, I promise!

Marcia and I moved to Iowa a little over four years ago, at the peak of 2012’s caucus season. Within a month of our arrival, Marcia was interviewed and quoted in an internationally-syndicated Reuters article, after we attended a candidate rally on a whim. So we learned first hand that it’s easy to have your say in public when you live in a small state with a vast media enterprise descending upon you.

Marcia’s quote in the Reuters interview was thoughtful and balanced, but that’s not the norm, frankly, especially in hotly contested races like those unfolding now. A lot of the quotes coming out of Iowa lack balance as voters and campaign flacks attempt to sway others to their cause, and many other quotes coming out of Iowa lack thought because politics is primarily a gut sport in many areas of the State, like football, or deer hunting. Reaction and reflex matter more than deliberation and discourse, especially under the media’s unrelenting kleig lights — which many thoughtful voters are repelled by, even as they draw the most reactive voters into their beams.

By the time I left Iowa, I reached the conclusion that the caucuses are bad for America. That being said, were I still in the State, I would be participating tonight, because I consider voting to be a civic responsibility of all citizens, regardless of how I feel about the process. Marcia (who still works out of Iowa and has maintained residency there) and Katelin (who lives and works there full time) are planning to caucus tonight, so I hope they enjoy the evening and I look forward to hearing about it from them. The media army in Des Moines is largely based in the same building where Katelin works, so she’s getting to really see it all up close and personal. That’s an experience, if nothing else.

I wrote a lot about Iowa while I was there, with many of my pieces being tongue-in-cheek explorations into some of the State’s unique cultural habits and history. One of those articles — Iowa Geography: An Introduction — has recently gotten a bit of renewed online traction after Molly Ball of The Atlantic re-tweeted it a couple of time for her followers.

So in a spirit of helpfulness to those of you who may be either wondering a bit about, or wandering about a bit, of Iowa today, here are a few other articles that may help you get what’s going on, and why:

There’s but 10 days left in 2015, and my calendar looks fairly packed for many of them with family visits, cultural events, work and other commitments, so the shortest day of the year seems an apt time to review the year gone by, as I experienced and documented it online.

Counting this one, I have published 77 blog posts in 2015. In October, I marked the one-year anniversary of my decision to shut down Indie Moines and re-establish this domain as my primary home for new and archival writing after eight years of hosting my material elsewhere. I also added the 1,000th post to the site in October, with 20 years worth of material dating back to October 1995 now resident here. Traffic has been healthy and growing throughout the year, so I’m grateful to those who have followed along with my various adventures in writing.

I actually opened 2015 deep in the middle of one such adventure, managing the satirical Des Mean website (now dormant, former motto: “Is This Hell? No, It’s Iowa.”) under a pseudonym. It was a fun opportunity for the sorts of character-based, site-specific writing that I used to do at Upstate Wasted and Upstate Ether, among other places, all those years ago. I moved most of the Des Mean pieces to this site last summer. Of the pieces written in 2015 (Des Mean launched in 2014), I am particularly pleased with Rashomoines, Why Iowa First?, the “Iowa Art Crisis” series (Part One — Part Two — Part Three), Danny Allamakee’s Iowanferno and Universal Iowa Recipe. Fun to write, hopefully fun to read.

Despite busy work and personal schedules, I did find time to travel in 2015. In late January/early February, Marcia and I spent two week in Fort Lauderdale, giving me the chance to get my nerd on during a road trip up to Kennedy Space Center. Then in May, we went to Spain and Portugal on a wonderful small group tour, where we framed a fun new travel game. I’ve also visited Texas, Florida (where I rode four days in the STIHL Tour des Trees), Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Iowa for work purposes, and made two volunteer trips to Great Barrington, Massachusetts, where I was elected Chairman of the Board of the American Institute for Economic Research, and then to Troy, New York, where I was keynote speaker at the Chapel + Cultural Center’s Committee of 100 Dinner. I also spent a few days with my mother, visiting the homeland in Low Country South Carolina. There were cemeteries.

Those sad notes notwithstanding, it was a very good year for me and the family, and I appreciate the opportunity to journal it here, for both posterity’s and my own sake. Thanks to all who read here for being a part of it, each in your own ways.